Wikipedia Strengthens Rules Against Undisclosed Editing

A week after a coalition of big public relations firms vowed not to secretly edit their clients’ Wikipedia pages, the foundation that runs the online encyclopedia is going a step further by strengthening its rules against the practice.

Beginning Monday, changes in Wikipedia’s terms of use will require anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement. Katherine Maher, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s chief communications officer, said the changes address a sentiment among volunteer editors that, “we’re not an advertising service; we’re an encyclopedia.”

A blog post announcing the changes on Monday said in part: “Undisclosed paid advocacy editing is a black hat practice that can threaten the trust of Wikimedia’s volunteers and readers. We have serious concerns about the way that such editing affects the neutrality and reliability of Wikipedia.”

Other rules beyond the new terms of use may also apply, depending on the section of Wikipedia involved, and could require further disclosure or prohibit paid advocacy editing altogether. In extreme cases, companies secretly editing articles about their clients could be violating federal guidelines, the Wikimedia Foundation points out in a “frequently asked questions” list accompanying the new rules. The foundation cites Federal Trade Commission guidelines that “the poster should clearly and conspicuously disclose” any relationship to a company being mentioned as well as to “readers of the message board.”

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation and the big PR firms said their announcements were not connected. Although the foundation was aware PR firms were working on the issue, “We didn’t know the PR firms’ statement was going to be published,” Maher said. “No one from the foundation was consulted.”

William Beutler of Beutler Ink, who organized the PR firms’ statement, said he was aware the foundation was addressing the issue, but not that changes were imminent.

Throughout February and March, the Wikimedia community extensively discussed the issue of undisclosed paid editing, resulting in 320,000 words of discussion on the site and 6.3 million views of the proposal that is being adopted.

Undisclosed paid editing of articles has been an ongoing problem for Wikipedia, which has some 80,000 volunteer editors across all its platforms. Last fall the Wikimedia foundation said several hundred accounts may have been used as so-called sockpuppets to deceive other editors about their true identities; it traced the changes to “a group of hired writers.”

As a current example of the problem, volunteer Wikipedia editors point to an ad posted on the freelancing bulletin board Elance offering more than $10,000 for “crisis management” of the Wikipedia page for Banc de Binary. The Cyprus firm has been cited for unregistered options trading by the Security Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Along with the ad seeking paid editing of the page, volunteer Wikipedia editor Peter Ekman of Media, Pa., said the page shows many signs of biased editors seeking to remove mentions of the company’s problems with U.S. regulators. Banc de Binary did not respond to requests for comment.

“The problem of paid editing on Wikipedia is extremely serious, as are related activities like hidden advertising, PR spin, and marketing in general,” said Ekman, who assisted the Wikimedia Foundation with the new terms of use.